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Americans are rethinking where they want to live

economist.com

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Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#301

Post by jedberg »

onychomys wrote: post #53
asimpletune wrote: post #39

I'm also sure a small percentage of people from the USA may even rethink living there.

My company has gone to work-from-anywhere-as-long-as-it's-in-the-USA, there's some sort of complicated tax thing that comes if you live in another country but work in the US, and they don't want to deal with that.

> there's some sort of complicated tax thing that comes if you live in another country but work in the US

As an employer I have to fill out a lot of extra forms for someone outside the USA. But there are companies popping up to solve this -- they take care of all the paperwork for you, for a fee. Usually you negotiate with the employee to reduce their paycheck by however much the fee is, and everyone wins because they are going somewhere with a much lower cost of living (or you just eat the cost to keep a good employee).

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#303

Post by finiteseries »

davewritescode wrote: post #107

I think a lot of people are seeing what they want to see in this. Once a company figures out how to leverage a developer in the Midwest as effectively as one in the Bay Area what stops them from hiring in the Dominican, or Mexico or South America? I've worked with fantastic developers from those areas who can effectively work on the same timezones, communicate well and write high quality code. I know personally, I've…

This isn’t an article about developers, tech, or remote work.

It’s about a general trend of existing US residents across many industries relocating to the affordable, low tax, business friendly suburbs of cities where people do things besides converting funding into JSON.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#304

Post by lowbloodsugar »

dqpb wrote: post #153
ravitation wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it. This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience. I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are jus…

There is a litany of social and governmental problems plaguing California, but I always stayed because it's the climate that feels the most natural to me. What finally drove me out was the seasonal firestorms and rain of ashes.

Indeed. Kids having "fire days" off school instead of "snow days"; the backyard looking like a blanket of snow, except it's gray.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#305

Post by vineyardmike »

phkahler wrote: post #248
larrymyers wrote: post #10

My family and I decided to stay on the north side of Chicago, a very high cost of living location, despite no longer needing to head downtown every day for work. Why not move outside of Chicago where our cost living would be substantially lower? * We wanted to keep our kids in the same school, which is walking distance. * We like being walking distance to the grocery store, doctor's offices, etc. * Our kids can walk…

What would you think of a combination of high density and large green space? Lay out a city like a fractal with the interior being dense, but you're always close to woodlands, open fields (farms?), or parks. I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers, but what would you think of such an arrangement?

> I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers,

Also not a lot of undeveloped cities either to try it out.

For what its worth, something similar (but less dramatic in scale) was already tried before [1]. People tended to not like it. The park space made it a lot harder to get around. You lose the "its ony three block away" nature of cities when you add lots of dead space, and things like rain cover along sidewalks become a problem.

One of the major things that make city streets "walkable" and enjoyable is stuff happening on the street frontage. The complexity of various shops, eateries and city amenities abutting the sidewalk mean there is reason to be there and things to do. You lose that when you recess a building.

I think a much better approach is just to cede some land to be in-city-grid parks, and take over some minor roads and alleys as green-walks where the road is reduced (eg. curved to force slow traffic) or removed, and theres lots of trees and gardens and walkways. Basically get that green space from incremental reclamation, and protection of existing opens spaces. Leave actual city structure as it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#306

Post by honkycat »

I grew up in a rural town around 4 hours from St. Lois.

I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID!

A short list of things I disliked:

- Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads.

- Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff.

- Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there.

- Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE.

- Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college.

- Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town.

- Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#307

Post by Jensson »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #253
socialdemocrat wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe many smaller stores are competitive by aiming for high turnaround. The cut down on the selection to the things that get sold fast. German Lidl and Aldi are based on these principles and known to have very low prices. In fact I think they outcompeted wall-mart when it tried to setup shop in Germany. I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop…

Lidl and Aldi are also doing very well in the US, and putting pressure on big grocery stores. But these are still too big to be downtown stores, and the merchandise is usually sold in quantities that make sense for a car. They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.

> They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.

But you see it in Europe. I walk to lidl and buy my groceries, basically every person I know walk to get groceries. Some do big weekend shopping trips now and then to bigger stores, but that isn't the norm.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#308

Post by coldpie »

donatj wrote: post #77

I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations. I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this. Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.

Police budgets are at their highest levels in history, and yet crime is up. The correlation just isn't there. Wasting money on police isn't solving this problem, which is why you are seeing the calls to move our funds elsewhere.

Also worth noting that MPD engaged in a work stoppage last summer, which may have had an impact on crime. https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#309

Post by [deleted] »

foofoo4u wrote: post #91

I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving. - $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment. - Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment. - Smells like urine on many sidewalks. - Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown). - Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings. - Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your…

[deleted]

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#310

Post by labcomputer »

mwattsun wrote: post #197
foofoo4u wrote: post #91

I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving. - $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment. - Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment. - Smells like urine on many sidewalks. - Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown). - Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings. - Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your…

It's weird how subjective experience can be so different. I live in East San Jose a mile from downtown. I'm very happy with it. I love riding my electric bike around town and my only complaint is that for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized. I can't related to most of your other complaints. Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives abou…

> for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized

No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths.

The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this might be to encourage walking and cycling, but you run into the exact same problem on a bike. The infrastructure isn't very ped-friendly, either.

I just don't get it. The stoplights are timed to make travel excruciating no matter how you do it. The problem with El Camino light timing ends when you cross into San Mateo county, btw.

It's the polar opposite of LA, where you can drive 10's of miles (late at night) on surface streets with the cruise control set right at the speed limit, never touching the gas or breaks. Cycling in the valley or on LA's west side, you can usually hit 3-5 greens before needing to stop (and then only briefly).

Edit: formatting

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